LTE (Long Term Evolution) is designed for a frequency reuse of one, meaning that every base station uses the whole system bandwidth for transmission and there is no frequency planning among cells to cope with interference from neighbouring cells. A consequence of this is that LTE macro-cell deployments experience heavy interference at the cell boundaries. One means to mitigate the effects of interference is inter-cell interference coordination (ICIC), where physical resource blocks (PRBs) in one cell or sector are muted in a coordinated manner, so that the SINR (Signal to Interference and Noise Ratio) of cell-edge users scheduled in these PRBs in adjacent cells is boosted.
US 2012/0231742 presents an interference coordination method for a radio communication system including a plurality of user equipment configured to communicate on radio resources with transceiver stations. The transceiver stations exchange between transceiver stations one or more coordination messages concerning interference on an interfered radio resource, and determine a score of a potential allocation of the interfered radio resource to potentially-interfered user equipment based on said coordination message or messages. In order to calculate the score, interfering transceivers send “push” messages, while interfered transceivers send out “pull” messages. However, this bi-directional message exchange for interference coordination increases the load on the X2 interface and may aggravate the already present issues with latency.